Pictures Showing What Happens on Each Page of Thomas Pynchon's Novel Gravity's Rainbow by Zak Smith & Steve Erickson

Author:Zak Smith & Steve Erickson
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9780977312795
Publisher: Tin House Books
Published: 2006-12-29T22:00:00+00:00

WHAT THIS BOOK IS AND IS NOT

Page 49: “... the sight of your blood spurting from the flaccid stub of artery ...”

... and there I am in the drawing, the blood spurting from what’s left of a skinny, tattooed arm. Because when I read that sentence (or one of the very few others in which Pynchon uses second person) I think of me—just as when you read it you probably think of you. So in trying to be thorough as well as faithful to my understanding of the words, I very occasionally ended up making pictures that simply wouldn’t do if I’d actually been hired to illustrate this book. Instead of drawing some sort of WWll-era British everyman or-woman mutilated for that picture, I chose to be faithful to what I saw in my head when I read that sentence rather than to what some art director would’ve demanded.

That having been said, I am conventional and sober-minded enough that when Pynchon writes, say, “ambulance,” I see an ambulance in my head, not a washrag. I might even go look up a 1940s German ambulance to make sure I get it right. So don’t worry, this book is not some hippie word-association game.

On the third hand—“Silver and black. Curvewarped reflections of stars flowing across, down the full length of, round and round in meridians exact as the meridians of acupuncture” (page 699). OK, dude, you draw that. Sometimes—maybe half the time—Pynchon’s language requires interpretation, which is one of the reasons it was fun to draw (How can I make a thing that looks like a benzene molecule and a snake at the same time? How can I make an angel in the sky that you’re not sure you’re actually seeing?), and one of the reasons it might be fun for you to compare notes with me as you read, and one of the reasons that any attempt to make a definitive set of illustrations for Gravity’s Rainbow would be doomed from the start.

That’s why there are no words opposite the pictures in this book. There is nothing official about what I saw when I read. What you’re holding right now is just my end of a three-way conversation about a book between you, me, and the guy who wrote it.

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